


Fragrance of the Gale

by allyoops



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alpha/Omega, Consent Issues, Crying, F/M, Knotting, Loss of Virginity, Maledom/Femsub, Masturbation, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Multiple Orgasms, Rough Sex, Sex Education, Underage Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, all the consent issues, eventually, sex as education, with plausible deniablity if you want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:00:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27703135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allyoops/pseuds/allyoops
Summary: Megan would like the man in the cottage to be her first.By the time he's done with her, she may also hope he's her last.
Relationships: Jaded older Alpha who thinks this is a bad idea/Inexperienced teen omega in over her head
Comments: 25
Kudos: 226
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	Fragrance of the Gale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mimsical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimsical/gifts).



> Title drawn from a line of the poem "Ho Landsmen!" by Lydia Howard Sigourney.

A man stood on the front porch of the cottage by the sea. Megan was pretty sure she could get him to fuck her, if she tried.

The thought was as disturbing as the urges that inspired it. Megan never used to think like that. She used to be very ordinary. She would go to school and hang with her friends and think about homework, and how to get out of homework, and how to convince her mother she didn’t have homework so she could meet up with Liv and Kayley before supper.

Now . . .

Megan had scaled the breakwater immediately after arriving home from school and found the perfect rock to perch on; an ideal vantage point. She didn’t have to wait long before he walked out of the cottage, a purpose-built one-bedroom shoebox with a porch that Megan’s parents offered at a discount in the off season, to watch the water. He held an enameled mug of something hot, coffee maybe, and Megan was close enough to see steam curling off the surface. It was cold outside and would get much colder before winter was through, but the man didn’t seem bothered. He had the hot drink and he dressed like he knew what was coming, in battered leather slippers, well-worn jeans and the kind of nondescript sweater you could have found at the back of any closet in any home along the coast.

His outfit matched the rest of him: comfortably understated in masculinity, conventionally good looking with backswept hair and strong, stubbly jawline. He looked nearly old enough to be her dad, but that didn’t bother Megan. Maybe, she thought, that’s what it was like when you were made the way Megan was. Maybe it made you want somebody who looked like they knew what they were doing, because you knew you didn’t yet.

And Megan definitely did not know what she was doing, but she liked that he looked like he might.

She’d told Liv about him this morning, a kind of mad Friday impulse, and Liv hadn’t understood at all.

“Do you even _know_ him?” she demanded. Megan dodged the question rather than admit she really didn’t.

“He rents one of our cottages,” she said, but Liv was clearly not persuaded this counted as any kind of familiarity.

“That doesn’t mean you know him. You don’t know anything _about_ him; he might not even _be_ that way. I mean, can you even _tell_?”

“I can tell,” said Megan. Liv was unconvinced.

“How?” she said, but how could Megan hope to explain?

Livvy wouldn’t know. She was still _normal_ , and she always would be. She was in-between, uninteresting to Megan, uninteresting to the people who were interested in people like Megan. She passed her days in as ordinary and unremarkable a state as anybody could have wished, just like Megan used to do, but never would again. She didn’t know what it was like to look at somebody like Megan did the man in the cottage; like Megan wanted him to look at her.

“I can just tell,” she insisted, then made Liv swear not to tell, because if Liv told anybody it would all be over before it even began. Megan’s mother would find out, she would take Megan to the doctor so they could adjust her dosage, and then homeschool her until she graduated. She would make Megan take her college courses by correspondence, too, because Mom cared more about Megan getting her diploma than she ever would about letting Megan _experience_ life.

Megan, sitting on her rock, watched the man until he turned from the water to go inside. He _saw_ her sitting there. She registered the moment he noticed her because he paused, looking. She tried to picture herself as he must, a smallish figure curled up against the driving wind, her knees tucked under her chin, her shortish, reddish-brown hair whipping into a mess of windblown tangles as she sat there, waiting.

She waved once she was sure he was looking. He hesitated a moment, then waved back and went inside. Megan lingered a moment longer to see if he might come back out, and when he did not, she untucked herself from her cozy little perch and climbed down off the breakwater to head for home.

* * *

“How long’s the man in the cottage going to stay?” she wanted to know. Her father glanced up from the computer screen, not so surrendered to the enigma of their bargain-brand accounting software that he failed to discern cause to be wary.

At last he said, “He took it til spring,” and passed a fretful hand over his lower back as though her question had pained him there. “Why?”

Megan shrugged, affecting disinterest.

“I only wondered. Seems like a weird time of year to stay at the beach, is all.”

“He’s a writer, I think,” Dad said vaguely, turning back to his screen. “Travel books? Blog. Travel something. Doesn’t want to be disturbed.” He shot Megan a meaningful stare, but Megan was scraping at the chipped remnants of polish on her thumbnail, and had to all appearances already lost interest in the topic.

“Mmm,” she said absently. “‘Kay.” And she wandered away again, leaving her father to decide whether or not his first instinct of concern had been warranted.

Dad, she knew, would ultimately decide that his unease was not something he needed to pursue. It was easier not to, and Dad liked easy. It would be more difficult with Mom, so Megan resolved not to mention it at all. Not to bring it up, or let Mom know where she had been that afternoon, and every afternoon this week. Because once Mom knew, it would be all over. An angry phone call to the clinic would precede an adjustment on her dosage. Then the clunky black laptop, standard issue for every satellite school student who could not safely return to the classroom at this time, would arrive on their doorstep and Mom would lock Megan in her room until the dosage regulated her system and she had no further interest in the man by the beach.

Megan slipped down to the front hall and retrieved the guest book from its place in the bottom drawer.

 _Adam_ _Harrison,_ she read. _Travel photographer_.

She retreated to her room, quietly triumphant, and carefully locked the door before settling on her bed and spreading her legs.

She imagined the body beneath the sweater and the jeans. She imagined his hands on her, strong and demanding, and the way he would lie her back and spread her open and—

She came hard, her hand cupped over the part of her she longed to introduce him to, shaking, gasping, slicking her palm until her hand came away gleaming with something sweet and sticky.

She imagined he would be pleased with her for that.

* * *

Adam saw the kid watching from the rocks, and instinct pricked remorselessly at his cervical vertebrae.

 _Damn_ , he thought when she waved, so casually unaffected, so transparently . . . well.

He waved back, and abruptly went into the cottage to think.

His landlords for the winter were pleasant, unremarkable people. He had seen the telltale symbol on their website when he made the booking, but after meeting both his hosts and determining neither showed any of the usual indications, he’d naively assumed the government-mandated symbol warning of one or more cyclicals on the premises might refer to some part-time worker who made up the beds or maintained the grounds. The idea that the individual indicated would be the hosts’ teenage daughter had not occurred to him until the day after he checked in and saw her standing on the path to the beach, turning a slow, contemplative circle as she watched the gulls wheel and skirl overhead. She hadn’t noticed him, and he’d beat an immediate retreat, but she had sniffed him out soon after.

He was no great judge of these things, but she seemed young to be cycling. Or maybe she just _looked_ young; he was admittedly a poor judge of ages, too. She was slightly built, with short red-brown hair and a gaze too often fixed on him for safety: hers and his alike. Wholesome-looking girl, really, which made him feel all the more guilty for what he thought at the sight of her.

What he felt.

He was going to check out at the end of the month, he decided, and hang the deposit. Her parents could pursue whatever legal recourse they liked; he wouldn’t fight them. Because the way their daughter kept turning up to stare, they’d be pursuing a much different legal recourse if he stayed.

It wasn’t even flattering, no matter what some people might have thought. She was barely grown! A woman who’d learned what she liked and knew what she wanted setting her sights on him like that would have meant something, but a kid who just woke up one day too big for her booster shot, aching for a knot, was going to wave her ass at any cock in easy reach. He knew better than to be flattered by that.

She was a cute kid, and in a few years he bet she’d be an undeniably fun fuck, but the hassle of everything that would come after was not worth the grief. Let her finish school, go off to college and make her own mistakes in her own time. Adam was not interested in being her first.

He certainly wasn’t interested in being litigated into marriage or any other legal responsibility for her, depending on which view her parents took.

Adam stayed in the cottage until he was sure the girl had left. He fucked around with the raw images from his trip along the coast, cleaned a lens that didn’t really need it, and drafted a response to an email that he’d have to wait to send until he actually went into town and had something more reliable than a spotty dial-up Internet connection to sustain him. Who even knew that anybody still used _dial up_? He really had come to the ends of the earth.

Time safely spent, he grabbed the smaller tripod, packed a couple lenses in the bag and stepped cautiously out onto the porch, checking the rocks first to ascertain she had not returned. The coast was clear, so he started down the beach toward the walking trail he’d found the day before, pleasurably anticipating the evening’s work.

This part of the world had a dignified, weather-beaten civility to it that always drew him in. Stubborn salt-grayed clapboard cottages, the roiling cold surf and the stark blue-black silhouette of the pines filling in the skeletal frames of denuded maple, oak and beech gave Adam a low-down haunted feeling. He was into it.

He took his time marking the distance through the woods, needles squeaking underfoot, until he had followed the first circular trail in its entirety and paused at the original fork to contemplate the demands of the second. The next trail ran along the shore and was marked by rougher terrain. Adam was equal to the ground but he decided the tripod was not, and set it comfortably against the sign posts to await his return. He paced himself in accordance with the trail, rocky and jagged, and relaxed into the strain of his calf muscles, the way the wind bit into his cheeks despite the week’s worth of stubble he sported.

The trail stopped on a rocky promontory overlooking the surf. A bench had been set there in a kind of mocking welcome, as if lying in wait for any city travelers who could not imagine coming to the end of such a trek without some evidence of human civilization there to greet them.

He did not sit on the bench but rather leaned against it, watching the water, regretting the necessity of not being able to stay and see it change through the deadening freeze: ice cakes forming along the coast line while shore birds fought every survival instinct that should have drawn them closer to the ground in favor of wheeling above the waves as though hung there by the hand of heaven.

A soft crunch of long-fallen leaves startled him from his reverie. He whipped around to see her there: the cottagers’ kid, hair tossed around by the wind, cheeks pink and eyes dangerously cloudy as she stared at him. She’d been bundled against the chill in a shapeless plaid flannel jacket, obscuring the upper part of her form, but the jeans that skimmed her legs more than made up for it. Snug and dark, they highlighted the curve of her calf and the swell of her hip in a way that drew his eye to the very-nearly ripeness of them both.

His mouth watered, and he swallowed hard to hide it. _She’s trouble,_ he reminded himself. _Big trouble. You don’t want any part of it._

“Uh, hello,” he said hoarsely. She was staring at him so fixedly. Unnervingly. “Your—did your parents send you? To find me?”

She shook her head slowly, as though the very act required great effort on her part.

“They don’t even know I’m here.”

Oh, yeah. Big trouble.

* * *

Adam Harrison, travel photographer, was leaning on the bench like a figure cut from a catalog. He made Megan’s mouth water. His shoulders were broad, and there was something about the way he held himself . . . she hadn’t meant to startle him, but the way he turned was beautiful too. Fluid and defensive and real. When she spoke, it made him angry. His eyes were hard and cold, boring into her, and she immediately knew she should not look at him directly, so she lowered hers.

“Why would you say that?” he said roughly.

She studied her boots. Mud still clung to the rubber, evidence of her having taken the first trail before she found his tripod leaning against the sign post, understood her error, and corrected course to follow him here.

“Because maybe you wouldn’t want . . .” she stumbled over her embarrassment. The boldness of what she wanted to say to him. “Maybe you wouldn’t want them to know.”

“They’re your parents,” he snapped. “It’s their job to know where you are.”

She risked a look at him, then. She couldn’t help it. He stood dark and clearly-defined against the sky, the sun that had not shown itself all day already sinking lower behind the clouds at her back, bathing them both in the gray pre-evening light of almost winter. She looked at him searchingly, wanting to make him understand that she was ready for it not to be their job. That what she wanted from him would necessarily sever a familial bond, if not a legal one, and she was ready to let him do it.

If he wanted.

Which, she was starting to think, judging by the cold fury of his tone and expression, maybe he did not. Maybe there was something wrong about how she was going about this. Maybe she was supposed to do it better, or do more, or . . . do what, exactly, she realized she couldn’t say. She didn’t know. So, with the impulsivity of her age and the desperation of her kind, she simply asked.

“What do you want me to do?”

She might as well have taken off all her clothes right there on the path. She couldn’t possibly have shocked him any more than that if she had.

“Want you—” he shook his head, like he was trying to clear it of everything but the answer to the question. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Megan,” she whispered. “Megan Eliza—”

“Megan,” he interrupted, saying her name like it choked him. “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go home to your parents. I want you to tell them that whatever they put you on, it’s not enough. They need to increase your dosage. And then I want you to tell them that—” but he appeared to think better of the last thing he was going to say, because he stopped, just like that, and she could honestly not guess at the end.

Tell them what? That she had been swaying on the rocks in front of their only winter tenant, the heat of her growing need warming her in a way that a dozen heavy flannel coats never could? That she was staring at him like he was the last meal on earth, and she was prepared to drop to her knees, open her mouth and swallow him all—whole—entirely up until she was finally satisfied?

No.

He wouldn’t want her to tell them that.

So she waited patiently, mute, until he found the words he wanted to say.

“Tell them I’m checking out in the morning.”

“No!” the denial, the plea, exploded from her. “No, please, Mr. Harrison, you can’t— _please_.”

She hadn’t expected her desperation to register, so she was astonished to observe its effect on him. He stared at her, rattled, and picked his footing with obvious unease.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, tone strangely gentle, like he was actually trying to calm her down. “You’re just a kid, Megan. You have no idea. What you think you want, it’s not anything you’re ready for. You need to get your meds right, and I need . . . I need to go.” Then again, more as if to himself, “I need to go.”

That settled, he set the strap of his camera bag more resolutely on his shoulder and carefully skirted her position on the path, but he did not quite step wide enough. She reached out and caught him by the wrist so that he jerked and turned just as the wind gusted in off the water and blew the smell of her all around him. She did not know what she smelled like, exactly; it seemed to have no effect on her parents or friends at school, but she knew vaguely she was giving off _something_ and the sight of Adam’s face was all the proof she needed that her belief had been correct. She affected him in a way that the others were not. His nostrils flared and his eyes actually darkened. She was looking right at them and she saw it: the clear woodsy green of them deepened until she could hardly have called them green at all.

She thought hers might have darkened in response.

“I want you,” she whispered. He stared down at her in cold, empty silence for a very long moment before he spoke.

“You have no idea what you want.”

Then he jerked his hand free and headed back down the path to the beach, and the solitude of the cottage that waited there.

* * *

Megan was sure the game was up. Of course she didn’t intend to relay his message about checking out, but he would do that himself soon enough when he came to make good on the plan. Her father would be pissed, she was sure, but once her mother realized what Adam was and why he was leaving she’d probably calm Dad down in no time. Or maybe Mom already knew what Adam was—didn’t people have to disclose things like that? Megan was fairly sure they did. She even had a little symbol on her learner’s permit that disclosed her status, thanks to legislation that had been passed the year before she took her test. There had been a big stink about it at the time, some kind of privacy issue or other. Dad had complained about the effect the protests had on traffic. Mom had voted in favor, though, because she was very pro-regulation when it came to cyclicals, and Dad must have voted in favor too because he would, if Mom said to.

Which meant when Mr. Harrison had turned over his licence at registration, he’d have had a little symbol on it too.

Megan wondered if seeing it had caused Mom any hesitation or misgiving, or if that might come later.

She walked down the path to the house with her hands tucked in her pockets, hunched against the chill. The windows showed warm and golden against the pre-dusk silhouette of the house, and even with the low fever starting to build, her bones ached for the warmth within. When she opened the door the smell of supper made her mouth water.

“Weather system moving in,” her father remarked, as she passed him in the hall. “Early storm by the looks of it.”

“Snow?” Megan wondered. Not that they were guaranteed a day off school, but if things were really bad—

“Not much,” said Dad, dashing her hopes before they had even fully formed. “Looks like rain, sleet, wind . . . maybe a little snow and ice on the tail end of it. Going to be a mess, though.” He flinched, then, and rubbed his lower back as if anticipating the need to shovel and sling salt and sand into the bargain.

Megan, interest waning, wandered away to wash her hands and dodge her mother’s queries as to whether or not she had any homework this weekend. Mom made a great fried fish supper, but she was honestly a bore on the subject of homework, and Megan had a whole Saturday and Sunday ahead of her she wanted to enjoy.

“Where did you get to after school, sweetheart?” Mom wondered, and Megan gestured vaguely in the direction of the rocks.

“Walked around.”

Mom looked pleased, but delivered her usual admonishment about taking care on the rocks, especially with the tide so unpredictable this time of year. Then supper meandered away into its usual patterns of completion, clearing-away and washing-up, and Megan made her excuses as soon as she was able.

“I have homework,” she said, which was true. “I’m going to do it now.” That was not.

Instead she turned off the lights in her bedroom and leaned her forehead against the window pane, staring out into the darkness of the beach. The slim, warm sliver of light that eked out the shape of the cottage window stood out bright and golden in the darkness. She could not see him through it, but she imagined what he must be doing at this hour, probably finishing a meal of his own, maybe sitting down to a laptop or sinking into the couch with one of the battered birdwatching guides that Mom liked to leave lying around the place.

Maybe later tonight he’d have a shower . . .

The fever in her body kindled. Her back and belly were hot and scratchy, and suddenly there was no help for it but to strip off her jeans and flop down on the bed, her hand pawing greedily between her legs at the humming wall of sensation bearing down on her there.

She imagined him through the fire and flood of her need, rising over her, taking hold of her, and forcing—

Before she could finish the thought, everything below her waist melted into heat and pleasure and pure sensation. The image of him forcing her legs apart, holding her down, pressing inside her followed her through the twitching of her thighs and her greedy, frantic digging at the soft, hot flesh beneath her hand.

When she took her hand away, her fingers and palm shone wet and bright in the moonlight streaming in through the window. Before she could think better of it, she pressed one fingertip to her bottom lip and tasted it.

The scent and flavor were strange. Like nothing she could remember emitting before. Sweet and spicy and intoxicating . . . like she was trying to draw somebody close to her, specifically to that part of her, and entice them to partake of a meal. The idea of Adam pressing his mouth to her there made her head swim, and her body twitched approvingly in response.

The fatigue of her orgasm stole over her shortly after, but the satiation that normally accompanied it did not. Instead her need seemed only to have increased, and she fit an unhappy hand between her legs, rocking back and forth against the meager friction of her palm even as the weighty weariness of her limbs increased, and she eventually nodded off to sleep.

When she woke again the house was cold. Her mother was standing over her bed, gently shaking her awake.

For a moment Megan had no understanding of the time that had passed, and thought her mother had walked in on her touching herself. She jerked half upright in a panic, a denial rising to her lips—for all the good it would have done her—before belatedly registering the furry tongue and stiffness of her own limbs, speaking to a lengthy sleep, and the fact that her mother wore pajamas.

Then she saw the look on her mother’s face, and her panic took a hard left turn into brand new territory.

“Mom? What is it, what’s—”

 _Wrong_ did not come, because even though something clearly was, saying so out loud would make it too real. So Megan settled for, “going on” and let her mother fill in the answer.

“Your father is experiencing some . . . pain. I’m going to drive him to the hospital, and see if they can find out what’s going on.”

“I’ll come,” Megan said at once, and swung her legs over the side of the bed, but her mother forestalled the effort with a shake of her head.

“No, you need your sleep. I wouldn’t even have tried to wake you, except I didn’t want you to wake and find us gone.” She reached for the rumpled duvet, still in disarray from Megan’s departure from bed the previous morning, and drew it up. The weight of her distraction was evident in the fact she did not even seem to realize Megan was still wearing her shirt from yesterday. “You stay here, get your rest, and I’ll call you with any news.”

“Okay,” Megan said, and accepted a forehead kiss. “Love you.”

Her mother responded in kind, but the words were swallowed by whatever dream that followed.

The next time Megan woke, pewter-gray light was filtering faintly through her window from across the water and the telephone was ringing. She stumbled out of bed and into the hallway, where the upstairs phone continued to shrill until she thumbed the button and held it to her ear.

“Mrgghm?”

“Oh, sweetheart, I woke you.” Mom sounded much more herself this morning, brisk and purposeful and back in control. “Well I won’t talk long—it was kidney stones, and they’re looking after him now. He’s supposed to be able to go home tomorrow, but with this weather coming in I need you to be prepared that we might not be back before Monday. You know what the tide can do to the bridge.”

Megan did, but she was not yet awake enough for the implications of it all to sink in until she had hung up the phone and retraced a half dozen of her steps toward the bed.

Standing in the middle of her chilly bedroom floor, which ordinarily felt so cold but today was a welcome relief to the scorching heat radiating from her own bare feet, she looked down toward the water, and the cottage nestled there.

All at once she was wide awake.

* * *

The knock on his door pulled Adam from the couch, where he had just settled in with one of what seemed a truly extraordinary number of bird identification guides littering the book-holding surfaces of the cottage. He debated answering it, then supposed if it were, as he suspected, one of the parents he had told Megan to inform of his intention to check out, he might as well handle the confrontation sooner than later.

The confrontation waiting on the porch, however, was much slighter and unsteadier on her feet than the one he’d been expecting. Megan swayed, frowning slightly, and for a half-second he thought she might actually be drunk before the wind shifted and wafted cold salt air and heat-musk all over him. His body responded instantly, and he took a quick step back to get a grip.

“Jesus,” he said. He took a closer look at her, the increasingly cloudy eyes and the way her breathing was shallower, more rapid, than it had been the day before. Possibly than it had even been an hour ago—anticipation of a coupling seemed to have that effect on her sort.

He swallowed, and tried to maintain some degree of distance as he addressed her.

“Do your parents know you’re here?”

She shook her head, smiling dreamily at him.

“Nuh-uh. Gone to the mainland.” She sighed. “Dad was sick. But he’s fine now. Or he will be. Mom said so. And I . . .” she was leaning against the doorframe now, unconsciously rubbing one hip against it, like the urge to mark was starting to take over already, “I need your help.”

She wasn’t wrong about that, but he was still resistant to the idea that he would be providing the type of help she had clearly come looking for.

“I’m going to call them,” he said. “You can’t be alone like this.”

“I’m not alone,” Megan said irritably. “ _You’re_ here.” She looked around the room beyond the doorway. “And you don’t have a phone.”

She was right. He had chosen the location primarily because it would make him difficult to reach, and he liked the peace and quiet. The house had a phone, though; he remembered seeing it when he had checked in. He looked around the room as well, decided there was not much she could damage in a few minutes’ time, and gently steered her over to the couch.

“Wait here,” he said, and he hadn’t meant to sound in any particular way commanding or authoritative, but from the shiver that wracked her frame before she dropped obediently to the cushion, he supposed he hadn’t been quite as successful as he’d hoped.

“‘Kay,” she mumbled, and watched him leave with a kind of blank patience that he would have found desperately pathetic, and possibly a little arousing, if he hadn’t been so fired up with anger at the whole situation.

His anger mounted with every step of his journey up to the house, so that he hardly noticed the way the weather had shifted around him. How the hell could her parents leave her in that condition? Couldn’t they see what was happening to her? Possibly living as remotely as they did, they’d had no occasion to realize the consequences of letting her wander in that state, but if she went on like that much longer they were for damn sure about to.

He strode up the walk in a storm of what he imagined must be righteous fury, but was in truth at least half fueled by the frustration of repressing his instinctive response to the girl in her current state. He was older, sure, and he’d been around. He wasn’t some green kid popping a knot at the first scent of a ready cunt dripping its heat slick; he knew how to moderate his reaction to some degree. But he was only as good as his nature after all, and no matter how practiced his self control, it was inevitable that he would respond to her in the way his nature dictated.

He found the door unlocked, which only infuriated him further. Somehow this seemed proof of her carelessness, of her inability to make fit decisions in her current state, and it stoked his anger at her parents’ inability to see it for what it was. They had to come home and deal with this. If she went to school on Monday in this state, she’d have every compatible classmate lining up to ride her into perfect oblivion, and probably a few teachers, too.

He tried to be bothered by the mental image, but the tension in the front of his jeans indicated he was less than perfectly successful on that front.

He tamped down on his reaction with a Herculean effort, flicked on the desk lamp, located the phone, lifted the receiver—and quickly realized he’d no idea of what number he meant to call.

They must have a cell phone, surely. But he had not thought to ask Megan how to reach it. Cursing his poor planning, he started for the door again, which was when the desk lamp flickered and went out. A quick flick of the wall switch soon proved the problem was not limited to the desk lamp, but even so it took him a moment to understand what had happened. He had not noticed the weather in any appreciable way on his journey to the house, but now it all came bearing in on him, the wind whistling around the house, the way that even in mid-morning the sky was dark gray enough for him to have needed the lamp in the first place—all of it.

 _Storm_ , some more functional, logical part of him noted, and he had to agree with it.

Storm.

No power, and—he turned back to the phone just to make sure—no phone, either.

“Damn,” he said. He reflected with barely-suppressed panic that he had a cycling teenager waiting on the couch in a cottage he had rented from her parents, who were apparently away on the mainland and inconveniently unreachable to deal with this ungodly mess, and his anger mounted. “Damn!”

He forced his way back out into the wind, lowering his head against the force of it. Sleet, cold and stinging, lashed his face and he did not bother raising an arm to block it. He reached the shelter of the porch with a kind of reluctance, and hesitated on the threshold a very long moment before he squared his shoulders, pushed open the door and stepped in.

* * *

Megan’s world was an aching haze of warmth and need and lowkey irritation at the former being so prevalent and the latter so damnably unmet. She wanted . . . well. That was the problem, really. She _wanted_ , in a way she could never remember wanting before. This need was writ somewhere in the very core of her, a deep and unexplored part of her being that had gone so long unregarded that it refused to suffer her ignorance any longer.

She rolled around on the sofa, drooping this way and leaning that, not quite so far gone that she actually started rubbing herself against the cushion but certainly far gone enough that she knew it would feel amazing if she did. She wanted him to smell her there, to perceive her readiness for him, to . . . what? 

Some extremely ordinary part of her, the part that studied for math tests and washed her hair and tied her shoes and every other prosaic activity belonging to a normal life, told her that there was no rational answer to that. What she wanted him to do was not something she _herself_ wanted so much as instinct shaping a perception of need.

 _You just think you want this because your body is ready for it_ , that very rational inner Megan informed her gently. But heat-fevered hip-grinding Megan, the one sitting on a sofa that still carried faint notes of Adam’s deodorant and laundry soap and the natural oils of his skin and hair, was not in a listening mood.

She wanted Adam back, she wanted him on top of her, she wanted him inside her, and she wanted it so badly that she was certain she could not live without it. So when he came back through the door at last, weather-beaten and sleet-lashed, looking like thunder and smelling of the ice in a first winter’s storm, the noise that came out of her was the sweetest, sultry little crooning cry she had ever made in her life.

He jerked back at the sound, hand still on the door handle, and stared.

She could see his anger and exasperation at war with each other, but she didn’t mind either of those, because she could also see the way his nostrils flared of their own accord and his chest heaved once; twice in hungry, rapid succession at the scent of her.

She put her head to the side and finally gave in, briefly, to the urge to rock her hips. She felt so lovely below the waist. All buzzing and hot and wet and ready. So, _so_ ready. She wanted to tell him how ready she was, but she could see he saw it for himself, and she felt like initiating conversation might not be the very best idea. So she rocked once more, then sighed, and waited.

He still held the door handle, like backing out might be an option.

“Your parents aren’t home.”

She nodded absently.

“I told you.”

“And the—the phones are down.”

“Are they?” She looked around, as if expecting to find the truth of this written on some wall of the cottage. “Oh. Probably because of the storm.”

Pleased to have solved this mystery, she looked back to him, and noticed he did not seem as happy as she felt. He was staring at her still, clutching the door handle, and his chest kept rising and falling. She watched it, entertained. Up, down. Up, down.

She hadn’t realized she giggled until he flinched in response, then sidled into the cottage at last and shut the door. Still he stood on the threshold a moment, as if debating his options. Then, finally,

“Do you have—have a cell phone? Sat phone? Something we can use to call your parents?”

She settled into the confusion of this query with all speed.

“Why?”

He got hold of his temper with visible effort.

“To call your parents and tell them . . .” he gestured helplessly in her direction. “They need to come home.”

“They can’t.” She drew her knees up to her chin, and sighed pleasurably at the friction of her jeans against the parts of her that were most swollen and slick with need. “Dad’s sick. And there’s a storm. I bet the bridge will be out soon.” She leaned on the arm of the couch. “It doesn’t take much.”

The implications of this statement were so transparently unwelcome to Adam that she wondered if she should apologize for making it.

“Jesus,” he said faintly, and staggered into the cottage without even seeming to realize he had done it. She watched with friendly interest as he walked into the kitchen and stared out the window over the sink.

He would be looking at their house, probably. Dark and empty. Cold.

Megan stretched, luxuriating in the heat her own body was generating in the chill of the cottage. Tonight, she thought, she might not even need her duvet to keep warm.

“You should light a fire,” she suggested, brimming over with the generosity of spirit her arousal seemed to inspire. “So you can warm up.”

“What,” he said dryly, “no offer to provide that service yourself?”

She perked up at the thought.

“That’s a good idea. Would you say yes?”

He hesitated.

“No.”

He sounded very firm. Very sure. But . . . he had hesitated.

Megan twisted around to rise up on her knees and lean on the back of the couch, staring at Adam. At the way he held himself so stiffly by the sink, facing the window, his head turned only half to the side—just enough, she imagined, for him to see her out of the corner of his eye.

“What’s it like,” she said. “For you, I mean. What do _you_ feel, when—when it happens?”

He shook his head.

“It’s not that way for me. I don’t cycle anymore; strictly responsive ruts. I got the procedure done when I was about your age.”

Megan wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, no fair.”

“Why not?” he laughed. “Who wants to—” he broke off, and gestured expressively at her position on the couch.

“Nobody wants to,” Megan snapped, a resentful prickle tracking up her spine. “But no fair you get to not _have_ to. They don’t do glandular work on omegas, you know. Just your kind. Because we can’t have you rutting all over town, popping knots into anything that will hold still, but it’s fine that I have to get pulled out of school if my dosage can’t keep up.” She flopped back onto the couch, flat on her back, and stared up at the shadowed boards of the ceiling.

“I’m _going_ to get pulled out of school, if Mom finds out.”

Adam didn’t answer. For a span of time Megan thought he might even have slipped quietly from the living area into his own bedroom. But then all at once he appeared in front of her, standing at the arm of the couch where her feet didn’t quite touch, staring down.

“Why would your mother pull you out of school?”

“Because I’m in heat,” Megan snapped. She squirmed on the cushions, like the raging hormones that sparked this irritation under her skin were something she could scratch away. “If I go to school like this . . .” she stopped and sighed. Shut her eyes. “I can’t go to school like this.”

“Of course not. It’s fucking illegal, and for good reason. But you could go to the doctor and get a shot of something—you’d be off your cycle and back on the right dose in days.”

Megan shook her head.

“Mom won’t let me. She always says once the dose goes, there’s no point in it. It’s too risky that it might happen again. So she’ll pull me out and homeschool me and I’ll miss my prom and she’ll probably say I can’t go to away to college now—”

Megan broke off in horror as her voice cracked wetly over the word. Oh, no. She was not going to cry. Not in front of Adam. Rubbing her hindparts all over his sofa to get him wound up was one thing, but crying in front of him was out of the question.

She scrambled up in a panic, but the searing pity in his face had already landed. She grabbed one of the throw pillows off the couch—an off white, feedsack affair with some rope and an anchor awkwardly stuck on around the jaunty central slogan of “Life’s a Beach”—and pressed her face into it. The glued-on decorations scratched her cheek but she kept it pressed firmly in place until a firm, cool hand came to rest on her back.

“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. It . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

She fought her sobs under control before she dared to lift her face from the pillow and found he was looking at her with something very like . . . sympathy. And concern. And— _oh_.

Megan saw, belatedly, the effect that his proximity to her was having on him. She saw it in the quickness of his breath, the darkness of his eyes and . . . her eyes dropped reflexively to the distension in the front of his pants. Even the jeans he wore could not hide what she was doing to him.

She looked up again, tears evaporating, suddenly very still.

She felt small.

“Mr. Harrison . . .”

“Adam,” he said. It wasn’t an invitation.

She shivered.

“Adam,” she whispered. She started to look at his lap once more, then forced herself to hold his gaze. Why was it suddenly so difficult to make eye contact? “If you—if we—will I . . . stop?”

“Your cycle? No. Not right away. Not without medication. But knotting will reduce the symptoms. Your actual cycle—you don’t know how long it usually is?”

She squeezed the pillow tight against her chest like it was the ratty old blanket she had used to take to bed.

“I’ve never had one before.”

“Jesus,” he said, sounding for a moment like his old self, the irritated version of him she had chased down a cliffside path in some vain hope she could win him with words alone. “Right. So, _without_ intervention, without knotting or needles or whatever, two days is low average. Four days the norm, and for some . . .” he shrugged. “I hear six or seven isn’t impossible, but let’s hope you’re not that kind of extraordinary.”

The idea of this feeling lasting seven days made her almost sick to her stomach.

“Yeah,” she said faintly. “Let’s hope.”

Then she looked at him again, and saw him regarding her with the kind of proprietary scrutiny she had first thought she longed for, but now that she saw it, found it made her a little scared. She shivered, staring at his chin, because his eyes were honestly impossible to look into now.

He _wanted_ her, in a way he had not let himself want her before now, and something about knowing that made it clear she could no longer demand things of him. Not even eye contact. So she studied his stubble instead, as he continued thinking aloud.

“Let’s assume you’re on a four day cycle. That usually requires at least four knots to bring you off of. Once day two arrives, if you’ve had all four by then, you’re going to be almost back to normal. At least, as long as you’re knotted enough, you should be able to do most simple tasks. School . . . that would be out of the question, but day three you could manage it, assuming the bond held.”

“Bond?” she said faintly, and he sighed.

“The—the smell on you. Of me, and us together. No alpha is going to challenge that.” He paused, as a thought struck him. “Shit, you don’t have a boyfriend, do you? Girlfriend? Any prior claim I’m dealing with?”

Megan squeaked indignantly, offended by the very thought.

“I came onto _you_ ,” she reminded him. “I wouldn’t do that if I already had—that would be _cheating_.”

He looked at her with a kind of bemused smile, like the very simplicity of her rebuttal had reminded him, briefly, of everything that lay between them. The gap in years, experience, understanding . . . all of it. But he no longer looked at her like it scared him, and that made her glad.

“Of course,” he said. “How could I ever accuse you of such a thing?” He was actually _smiling_. Even in the dim, storm-dusk-darkened cottage interior, the way it crinkled his eyes and warmed his expression made her catch her bottom lip between her teeth. The sight of that small gesture instantly chased all levity from his expression. His face became set; commanding.

He stood up.

“Go into the bedroom, Megan.”

She unfolded her legs from beneath her, unquestioning, unhesitating, and stumbled obediently ahead of him into the dark.

* * *

The smell of her was everywhere. Adam was almost dizzy with it. His groin ached and he crammed his hands in his pockets to put a barrier less flimsy than his own self control between them and the soft red-brown tangle of her hair. It was only his age and experience that gave him the modulation of tone and expression needed to direct her to the bed, where she sat quietly on the edge and stared straight ahead.

He found a Coleman lamp in the closet, where he’d seen it while unpacking on the night of his arrival, and turned it on: a bright, warm note in a room with one other bright, warm presence breathing softly on his bed. He placed the lamp on the bedside table before returning to stand in front of Megan, his breathing as ragged as if he had grabbed her around the waist and carried her in there himself at a dead run.

He had certainly considered it.

“Do you know what’s going to happen?” he asked, and she nodded, still staring at the approximate region of his belt buckle. Her color heightened as she did, which he found devastatingly arousing for reasons he could not have put into words even on a normal day. Inexperience had never seemed particularly attractive to him before, but now, confronted with the impossibility of this girl, woman in shape and need alone, utterly inexperienced and completely desperate to be mounted despite never having been mounted before, he thought maybe he could see why some guys were into this kind of thing.

“Tell me what you know,” he said, and the steady, low timbre of his voice worked its magic on her. She twitched like he’d tugged on her strings, and the response came tumbling out.

“You’re going to put your knot in me.”

A smile tugged at the side of his mouth.

“That will be the end of it, or nearly, yeah. But before that.” He caught her under the chin and gently, firmly, forced her to look at him. Her eyes watered like she was staring into the sun.

“Have you ever done this with anyone, Megan? Anyone at all?”

She struggled against the contradiction of wanting to comply with his desires, and the need to break free from his grip so she no longer needed to look him in the eye. At last she shut her eyes, licked her lips—Adam’s cock jerked—and whispered, “No.”

“All right.” He released her chin and she looked down at her lap. “All right. We’ll start . . . slow. Er.” Because he could already feel that slow of the normal kind would not be possible for him this time. He studied her, considering how best to proceed, and decided that she would not object to his taking command.

“Shirt off, Megan,” he said, and she obeyed with such pure, unflinching lack of hesitation that he forced his gaze away so he could temper his answering surge of arousal. Her willingness, especially in the face of her inexperience, was sublime. He could not imagine lasting long with her. Not the first time. By the time he looked back she was bared to the waist, save for a simple little bra that was some kind of deep, blue-green color, bright but unadorned. His mouth went dry at the sight.

“Should I—?” she asked softly, and reached for it, but he shook his head, forestalling the attempt.

“No,” he said gruffly. “Let me.”

His hands looked so large and rough next to her skin. He popped the clasp with relative facility, but took his time easing it off her, watching the way her lips parted at the rush of cool air on warm skin, brushing a thumb across the soft rosy pink crest of her nipple and enjoying her quiet, answering gasp. She was deliciously responsive, and he only wished he had it in him to make this part last for her. Heat or not, her fault or not, Adam still had some vague notion that a girl’s first time should be special.

He lowered his head and pressed a soft kiss to the tip of each nipple, lingering particularly on the second with a slow, languorous suckle. A surge of triumph shot through him as this wrung from her a second rendition of that impossible sound she had made when he walked in, pure crooning need, designed to draw him to her, on top of her, and inside.

 _Inside_.

His gaze dropped to the crotch of her jeans, and he knew he could not wait much longer.

“Get your pants off Megan,” he rasped. “I need to see your cunt.”

If she was shocked by such crudity, she did not show it. She merely stood, mute, and shuffled out of her jeans. She took the panties with them, no ceremony, so the soft little forest of virgin curls was bared to his gaze mere inches from his nose as she disrobed, and the scent that emanated from her there shot his world full of highlights and thunder and raw, primal need as the urge took him over completely to conquer everything she had been chasing him to offer, begging him to take.

She wasn’t begging him now, he noticed. She wasn’t saying much of anything at all, but he liked that. Liked her better now that she was willing to take direction, instead of demanding her will of him. It fit better with his understanding of the natural order, and it made him want to be gentle. Adam was not often gentle in the heat of things, but he liked to think that with Megan maybe he could be, if only to make it easier on her.

As easy as it ever could be for a girl, learning herself like this.

“You look so sweet, bared for me like this,” he said, and she trembled appreciatively at the praise. He put his hand on her and she jerked back, but he waited patiently until she returned, penitent, to wiggle her feet apart and improve his access to her cunt.

“Good girl,” he said, and touched her just in time to feel the slick thicken in response to his approval. He stroked her a moment, fingers sliding easily around in her outer folds, already wet and ready and beginning to flower properly, labia thickened by her arousal and parted in preparation for a task they had never taken on before.

He gentled her with a finger inside, just one, little more than a fingertip at first. One knuckle, very simple, to let her feel him there.

“Have you ever put anything inside yourself?” he asked, striving for clinical tones, something neutral and remote.

“T-t-tampons,” she said, her teeth chattering. The overwhelming need that wracked her body stirred him to pity, and he sat back on his heels.

“Megan, sit down. Lie back on the bed. Just leave your cunt open for me, you understand? I need to see—” he broke off, dismissing the need for any explanation once he saw how instantly prepared she was to obey. “I need this,” he concluded, and she was already over, on her back, knees on the edge of the bed, feet hanging down, toes not quite touching the floor as he knelt between her parted legs and breathed in the bouquet of her desire.

Her need.

She had the prettiest little cunt he could have asked for. The slick of her gleamed and glistened on the full, dark lips. He imagined that in the ordinary way of things she might be more pink than red, but in the fullness of her heat the labia were already plump and engorged, her nether lips ripe and open and darkly rich with welcome. He leaned down and breathed her in, drunk on the spice and sweetness. Then he pressed in, licking and suckling until she writhed and shrieked and rewarded his efforts with a spiced flood of honeyed slick that warmed his tongue and dazzled his senses.

Not every alpha liked to debase himself this way; he had learned as much from the surprise of previous partners. He supposed there could be a perceived lack of authority in the posture, but he had never seen it like that. The right to taste her, to claim her with every part of him, seemed to Adam a far greater exercise of ultimate authority than merely sticking his dick in a hole.

“When you touch yourself, Megan, what do you use?”

He waited, patiently, for her to stir her tongue to sensible, intelligible forms of speech.

“With—my—my hand.”

“Mmm. Show me.”

She lay still a moment, gathering her thoughts, and then reached down to stroke her upper part of her swollen, needy sex.

The virgin garden of curls looked almost obscene next to her cunt’s womanly, open ripeness. Her fingers looked so small and pale, slim and dry in front of the wet scarlet of her ready cunt. She stroked it beautifully, so obedient to his request, loving her swollen little clit between middle and forefinger until she started to gasp sweetly in response to her own touch. He waited until her clutching became more stuttered, frantic, and then leaned in to cover her hand with his, pinning her palm against the heat-plumped flesh, trapping it under his own, and using her hand as his own instrument to grind his palm against the place of her greatest need.

She keened and writhed beneath him, but did not try to get away, so he did not rebuke her. Instead he gripped her little hand in his larger one and forced it against her cunt, using quick, sharp strokes, a more aggressive version of her own cautious pats before. Her voice keened thin and high in response, and he rose up over her, staring down in her face, eyes locked on the blank, ceiling-ward stare of her own as she convulsed and came.

“Good girl, Megan,” he growled, his hand continuing its work against her cunt, forcing her to ride her own palm as well as his, even through the spasms of pleasure that wrenched her limbs and made her thighs twitch. “Oh, _fuck_ , yes. Good girl.”

And he delighted in the way that even in the midst of her orgasm, she so clearly heard him, and tried to smile.

* * *

Megan’s whole world had narrowed to the bright point of heat between her legs. Adam seemed to know that and accept it. He let her touch herself there; _told_ her to. And he watched her do it. She saw him looking at her and at the place she was touching. The way he stared like he had every right to, like she was showing him something he already owned, made her tingle with a more familiar kind of pleasure even through the intensity of her heat. She spread her legs a little further apart so he could see better. He _deserved_ to see, she thought vaguely. It was his right to see.

It was his right to touch her, too. The contact from his mouth made her gasp and jump, but it never occurred to her to fight or refuse him. She was his to touch. Her cunt was his to touch. His hand was rough and demanding, but she didn’t mind. She almost liked it. The feeling of his strength on her, the way she could not stop even if she wanted to—not that she wanted to.

No, she wanted to come for him. He was asking her to; demanding it, even. She wanted to be good for him, to do what he said, to come on his hand and make him happy. So when he told her she was a good girl, she came again, so gratified to have gratified him.

After that Megan lay for a moment in blissful, insensate pleasure. The heat was still there inside of her, but it was softer, almost bearable, now that Adam had made her come.

She was not immediately aware of him, did not hear him removing his clothes, but he must have done because when next he appeared in her field of vision his chest was bare, and—her eyes skimmed downward—so was the rest of him.

His body was beautiful, cast in warm relief and deeper shadow by the harsh glare of the battery-powered lamp. There was lovely dark hair across his chest, crisp wires that narrowed at his belly and trailed thinly down to . . . she stared, hungrily, at the swollen readiness of his cock.

God, it was so big.

Somehow even with what she had read in books and peeked at online, she had not understood how truly big a cock could be. It was as large and red and angry-looking, as swollen as the fiery heat of her cunt had felt when she touched it, and she was suddenly very scared.

He must have known she would be because his hand was already on her chest in preparation for her one, abortive attempt to escape.

“No,” he said simply. And then he was rising up, over her, and the fear was still there, definitely still there inside of her, like when you were at the doctor and the needle was coming closer, the injection of her blocker that should have kept her from this time and place, this moment in time, but had not.

She wanted to run, same as she always wanted to do when it was time for the needle, but Adam was not going to allow it. He was too big and strong and he was not going to let her get away from him. Not now. So Megan whimpered and maybe even cried a little, but she opened her legs for Adam like a good girl and she made him smile.

“That’s the way,” he said softly. “You’re doing so well, Megan.”

The pressure of his cock against her was immense. He was not even pushing yet, just rubbing, letting her slick coat the thick, blunt head, readying himself for the task. But she could feel the enormity of him, the pressure building behind it as his own urgency mounted with the need to be inside of her.

She had to let him in. To make it clear she was ready for her role, prepared to receive him, no matter what else she might think and want and wonder.

So she tried to smile bravely and lift her hips a little, and—she was right! It made his eyes darken the way they did when, she was coming to understand, he was aroused by her. He took hold of her hips to correct her posture slightly, and then pushed—

Megan’s whole world collapsed, ended and was remade in a moment. A center point of pain and pleasure, the umbilicus mundi of her worth and purpose and being, coalesced at the point of their joining.

 _Inside_ her.

Just inside, yes, barely beyond the entrance, more indignity than true intrusion yet, but she felt like already he must be all through her being. As wet as she was, as hot as she was, she still felt like he was splitting her right down the middle. Spitting her slowly, like a slow-turning roast on a summer barbeque, and she did not see any possible end for it but that he should fill her up completely within and lodge somewhere at the back of her throat.

A low, agonized guttural rent the air, but until she saw him laughing she did not even recognize the cry as her own.

“Christ,” he said companionably, “bad as all that?”

Articulate speech was beyond her. She looked beseechingly up at him, eyes awash with tears, and scrabbled weakly at his back in some vain, vague, confused effort to entice him to stop. He smiled kindly at her but he did not stop. Rocked his hips back, yes, but immediately bore down again, pressing onward, further in, deeper than she had ever imagined she could take him already.

“Oh my god,” she tried to say, but it only emerged as an aching, raspy groan. He didn’t seem to mind; smiled again, even, and paused to kiss the tip of her nose.

“Sweet thing,” he said affectionately. “We’re going to use you much rougher than this, so you had better get used to it early on.”

Get used to it? Her mind reeled. How? How was such a thing even possible? He was her whole world now. The heart and soul and core of her, filling her up, beyond pleasure or pain, a kind of dominating, domineering demand at the very nucleus of her being, requiring that she yield all of herself merely to avoid being consumed by him.

As these apocalyptic visions roiled feverishly through her mind, Megan's body responded rather more sensibly than her brain. Her cunt, hot and slick and primed with the pleasure Adam had already forced on it, bore the man-size intrusion to barely more than girl-size depths with relatively good grace. His cock was able to make good progress despite her pain because he gave no quarter, but demanded she yield, and yield she did. She was not proof against her very nature, after all, and her cunt took him in very sweetly indeed after a few bruising strokes made it clear he would be the master of her one way or another.

While Megan writhed and whimpered and wept, her body nevertheless did exactly what it was made to do, and took Adam’s cock as deep as he could drive it.

When at last he had rooted himself within every available fold of space she had to offer in that moment, he settled in, legs tucked between her splayed ones, arms braced on the bed and wrapped in a kind of gentle hedge around her head. Her little body was dwarfed by his, split by his, secured by his, but it was also responding to his as it was only bound to do.

“Unnf,” she said, unhappily, and became aware that he was smiling at her, genuinely amused.

“Oh, come on,” he said lightly, and dropped another kiss to her face, this time to her bottom lip. “Give it another minute, and you’ll be begging me to ride you. Just wait and see.”

She was about to tearfully, carefully, as respectfully as she possibly could inform him that no, she _did not fucking think so_ when she became aware of the way her heat had shifted.

It was gentler. Calmer even than it had been after he’d made her come. It was a fizzing, golden garment of bubbles, a champagne tide boiling under her skin, all of it rushing from her scalp to her breasts to her navel and up from her feet, flowing to concentrate with unbearable fizzing sweetness at the point of intrusion of his cock, at her cunt where it held him, and she understood in an instant what he meant.

“Oh,” she gasped. Her eyes shifted out of focus so that the shape of him blurred, but his answering laugh was so vital, so triumphant, so _alive_ that she could picture him just as clearly as if she could see him still.

“See?” he chided, and a bright, brief pain lit her neck. He’d nipped her! But an answering rush of champagne bubbles coursed down from the spot his teeth had touched, spilling all over her so that she giggled, drunk on the pleasure, and rolled her hips up to take him in better. He growled softly, pleased, in response.

“Oh, fuck yes,” he hissed. “Christ, Megan, you’re a fucking jewel. Look at you. First time taking cock and you’re already begging for more.”

She basked in the praise, all her discomfort going fuzzy and forgotten-colored around the edges. Was she begging for it? She didn’t recall doing so. She hadn’t meant to. More of what already felt like _toomuchtoomuch_ didn’t sound like something she would ask for. But it sounded like he thought she was and that made him happy, which was good. Making Adam happy felt so, so good. She wanted to do more of it. So she rolled her hips again and he sucked air in sharply at the sensation of whatever it was that she made him feel.

“Fuck,” he gasped. “Oh, fuck—okay. If that’s how you want it.” And so saying, he grabbed her by the hips and held her in that position that the hip-roll led her into only briefly, the one that made her feel like she was bottomless inside, like there was no limit to how deeply and completely he could fill her.

By the time she remembered that she wanted to ask him to stop, he was already driving in, leveraging his weight against her where she lay pinned on the bed, pounding her deeper into the mattress so that it felt like the coverlet was swallowing her up and the whole world around them seemed to disappear.

The center of her universe, the place where he filled her, gently recaptured her focus. The pain of his invasion and the muffled undercurrent of her fear, the smothered panic coming from that regular ordinary version of Megan who chewed the ends of her pencils and hated folding laundry and had to muffle her curse words when she stubbed her toe so her mom wouldn’t hear, were all firmly subordinated by the primacy of her biological need.

It didn’t matter if she wanted this, though ordinary Megan certainly didn’t. It only mattered that her body knew it needed this and would not tolerate her pausing to remember his size, how small she was, how overwhelmed she felt as he held her down and used her cunt to take his cock, or any of the rest of that.

She needed to take this so she could feel complete, and every heat-thrumming nerve urged her toward the promised pleasure of that end.

So she cried through the pain she didn’t fully feel, and she stared blurrily at the jerking, lurching motion of his collarbones as he thrust to the heart of her, harder, faster, making her want it even though she didn’t, making her glad of it even though she was scared, making her gasp and moan and weep “more, more, God, more,” even while the Megan underneath herself wanted to beg him to stop.

She didn’t though—definitely hadn’t told him to stop. It felt even more impossible than looking him in the eye at this point, trying to deny him access to her cunt, which was why it came as such a surprise to realize he had stopped all the same.

“What—” she blinked up at him, the image resolving gradually through the blur of her pleasure and the conflict of everything that lurked underneath. “Why did—”

Adam was sheened with sweat, almost as flushed as she felt. He still loomed above her, arms still braced on either side of her head, and her cunt was still definitely full of his iron hard cock. He smiled a little crookedly, and shook his head.

“Can’t finish this way,” he explained. “Some can, but not me.” He pressed an oddly tender kiss to her forehead, so that his stubble scraped her nose and the scent of his shower product filled her senses, spiced and deeply male. “Time to turn over, Megan.”

She must have looked as incomprehending as she felt, because he chuckled and tapped her nose affectionately.

“Jesus, you don’t have a fucking clue.”

He didn’t say it in a mean way. He wasn’t mocking her. He sounded resigned, regretful, a little amused at having his own earlier, angry accusations so clearly confirmed by her lack of understanding. “Okay. I’d say we’ll take it slow, but that would be a lie. Tight as you are—Christ. Can’t believe I’ve made it this long, to be honest.” And he kissed her again, on the mouth this time. Lips closed, mostly—he didn’t try to make her open hers. But it was hard, fierce and claiming in a way that made her stomach explode with those sweet little champagne bubbles and a kind of wary desire to please underneath it all.

She needed to make Adam happy, her body reminded her. It was important that Adam be happy with everything that happened here. Whatever Adam asked of her, she had to do. So when he sat up, cock still inside her, and indicated with a peremptory flick of the forefinger that she was to raise her left leg and bring it across her body to join her right one, she did so uncomplainingly, with the strain of the exertion flashing only briefly across her face.

Once her legs were joined he gave her a gentle pat on the flank, which she understood to signify his approval, so the happy bubbles spiraled lightly down.

“Okay,” he said, “now we get you up on your knees—no,” his hand locked easily around the back of her neck as she tried to lift her head. His grip was firm and hard and unyielding. “Keep your head down.”

She trembled at the strength of his touch, at the demand she not lift her head above the mattress, understanding on a biological level what kind of submission this was meant to signify to him.

“Then—then how—”

His hand cracked down on her flank with unflinching punitive force. She yelped, then stifled further sound with a fist wrapped in the sheet and crammed between her teeth.

“Christ. Sorry. That was—sorry. Listen, Megan,” the strain of keeping himself in check sounded clearly in the tension of his voice, “you need—you need to listen.” In the ragged modulation of his words, she heard the truth of how difficult the educational role of their coupling was for him to assume. She could picture, though she could not see, the way the sinews of his chest and shoulders and the cords of muscle in his throat must be flexing with the strain of forcing his own ordinary Adam to the surface, in a perfect inverse of how she was keeping Ordinary Megan completely subsumed to her own instinct.

To show him she understood, she nodded once. Mute and subservient and perfectly obedient to his needs. He sighed, and she was pleased to have brought him even that much reprieve from the struggle of keeping himself under control.

“Keep your head down. Get your knees beneath you, and present yourself to me. Do you know—? No. Of course not. It’s . . . it’s like . . . you need to offer your cunt, Megan. Just your cunt. I want you to keep your head down and offer me your cunt. Don’t look at me, don’t look up, don’t—I’ll stop you, if you do. If you try to bring your head up I’ll have to punish for you it.”

Fear pulsed through Megan's body, rendering her mute and motionless. He seemed to recognize and regret her terror; she felt him shifting awkwardly, fumbling for the words he needed to explain.

“I don’t _want_ to hurt you, but some of what I’m going to do will be rough, and if you test me, it will be worse. So please,” his hand brushed her hair lightly to one side, giving him clear view of her profile before roaming gently down her back, tracing the brief expanse of her skin before coming to rest on the curve of her buttock, “don’t make me hurt you too much.”

She licked her lips, trying to figure out how to communicate that she understood. At last she figured out she could close her eyes and keep them closed, and even managed a tiny smile, like she was pleased to hear his instructions and receive his cock and obey.

“Good,” he breathed. “That—very good.”

Then his hands were on her hips and he was rising up behind her so she was obliged to follow, but just her ass, only her ass, her face was still buried in the blankets, her head pressed down to the bed with the urgency of her own understanding that she was not to look up or look around or do anything that he might interpret as a challenge to his claim on her, to his right to her cunt, to the effort he had already put in to making it his.

The first thing she noticed about the new position was how much room she had left in her to give. She had thought he filled her before, but now, with an easy, confident thrust, he proved her wrong. There was more of her yet to surrender, and he would take it all, make her take it all from him, before he was done.

He thrust with ease, now, so she could see what he meant about it needing to be this way. Not urgent jerky stabs at her guts, but deep, masterful strokes which showed the truth of his experience and the utter futility of any effort to resist. She settled her head on her arms, pillowing it there, and in so doing signalled her acceptance of whatever else he might choose to do.

He sighed in answering pleasure, and thrust again.

“Urgngh,” she grunted, but nothing else. And then when he thrust again, she did it again, because he was large and she was small and she needed to say something but she also knew it couldn’t be words. Not at this stage. Not now. Sounds and noises only, and only those as frequently as she absolutely had to—which, when he thrust that deep inside her, she absolutely did.

But only sound.

Nothing else.

The other sounds filtered through to her consciousness only vaguely, as background noise to the main event. The wind outside was howling now, fierce and unrelenting as the storm found them in the dark. The bed made aggrieved creaks with every leverage of Adam’s weight against it, against Megan, against the age of the springs and the slightness of her body, her hips and knees pressed into the mattress trembling to bear even the briefest forceful demand of his weight. His cock inside her made noises too, the rich wetness of her slick and skin meeting skin concocting a rich, earthy wetness of a sound, but all of that was more felt than heard.

Megan closed her eyes and gave herself over to the need to be fucked, to the completion her body had made it known she sought even before she had been able to understand the consequences of that need.

“Mmm,” she sighed, almost a purr, and Adam growled deep in his chest.

Then he picked up speed, and she felt the purposefulness of it all. The urgency in his claim as he hammered into her, the press of something even greater beginning to swell at the greedy, fat labia that already took him so well, the tightness—the stretch—wait. Something else was pressing there. Something wider, something even more. What—

Her head jerked up in panic. Not high, not for long, but it was enough to draw his attention and he grabbed her neck and slammed her down into the bed. His teeth clamped down on her shoulder with a snarl of warning and she yelped, pure submission, apology and pain all rolled into one.

“ _Stay down_ ,” he thundered, and she cringed away from the force of the sound, minding the domineering tone even more than she had the bite.

“Yes sir,” she tried to say, but she couldn’t manage it, only keened and whimpered and stilled beneath him as the thick, wet pop of the thing he had been forcing into her sounded clear proof of his triumph.

And then Megan knew what it felt to be _full_. Not merely forced to take a big cock or pinned on her face or made to fuck a man so much bigger than her, but _really_ full, as only an alpha could make her, with knot and cock and cunt-sealing completion, so that stars burst behind her eyes and what should have been pain only swelled instead as the perfect champagne crescendo of her pleasure so that she convulsed and came and came and came and cried and came again.

And Adam fucked her through it all, though he could no longer pull back or withdraw, could only force deeper, deeper inside of her, rutting little stabs and jerks engineered to make her take him, to make her feel that she must, that she had to, so she would come and keep coming until finally the frantic clutch of her greedy cunt did what it must and wrung from his cock and balls the orgasm she needed him to have so he could fulfill his claim and make her whole.

Complete.

Adam collapsed on top of her, cock surging in her cunt, and she felt the flood of his semen fill her. She came again, sobbing. How many times had she come by now? Her cunt felt raw and full and sore and right, _God_ , so right. Would anything ever feel as good to her again as being used like this? His weight on her was stifling, there was no more _up on your knees_ , only Adam, heavy, exhausted, clutching her to him, pulling her close, cock still in her cunt, cunt full—so full—as his arms wrapped around her body and she disappeared in the smothering warmth of his embrace.

He thrust again, just once, so that she felt the second surge of his semen inside her and it was too much.

She cried until it all overcame her and even the dim, wind-echoing shadows of the world beyond the room faded away into darkness, and Megan followed it there.

* * *

Adam had hoped Megan would not come back to her senses until after his knot had shrunk enough for him to pull out. Her little body went limp and sweet against him for a minute or two, and he let her be, didn’t even test the strength of their tie like he normally would need to do, because she was just that perfect around him, that tightly sealed, that he knew there’d be no popping off until he went well and truly down. He hoped she’d stay out cold for that, poor kid. It was so much for a grown man to ask of a little body like hers, and he had hoped to spare her the strain, but no such luck. She did not stay out for long, and he supposed that should have come as no surprise. The kid was new to it all, but she was still made for it. He was smoothing the pad of his thumb over the scarlet tooth indents in her shoulder when she stirred, all sweet thin whimpers and squirms of discomfort, so he had to snug his free arm around her waist to prevent her from hurting herself.

“Easy, Megan,” he soothed, and she settled, the remnants of her mating submission still very much in charge for now. “You’re not going anywhere for a while. Feel that?” He tugged ever so slightly, and she wept at the way she was dragged by his knot, how he was able to shift her whole body with just a flick of the hips, so he gentled her fear and the burgeoning pain with two thick fingers rubbed over her clit, reminding her she could come—indeed she did come, again—and that coming on his cock would help it all not feel so bad.

“It’s big,” he said frankly, “and it’s going to stay like that for a while. You just have to take it inside you for as long as it takes to go down, I’m afraid. No help for it but that.”

“It’s big,” she echoed, and started to cry again. “Adam it’s too big, take it out, please.”

“Shh,” he sighed, and his hand stole down to tweak her little clit again. Even the responsive spasm of her cunt was not quite sufficient to dull the pain he knew she must feel, but it would be a help, if only a little. “There you go, honey. Come for me again, okay? It will help you forget. You can do it, Megan, there’s a good girl—come on my knot, sweetheart. You’ll feel so much better if you do.”

She did, coming obediently at the clumsy push of his finger and the strain of her cunt on his knot, so he could not help but come again himself, something he hadn’t done in years, a third ejaculation from a single coupling, spilled into her flooded, willing, waiting cunt. He must have blacked out himself a little because when he came back to the room in his full senses she was no longer crying, but with tear tracks still wet on her cheeks had actually gone to sleep.

Adam signed, as much in gratitude for relief of the ache of his own conscience as for her comfort, and settled in to wait.

* * *

When Megan woke again, Adam was no longer inside her. He was still in the room, but not on the bed, and when she struggled to sit up and he soothed her back onto the pillow with a hand on her shoulder and meaningless gentle sounds, she saw he’d put his jeans back on, though his torso was still bare.

“Aren’t you cold?” she asked blearily, because it seemed important, and he laughed.

“Are you?”

Oddly, she was. Not freezing like she should have been in a dark cottage with foul weather outside, but colder than she had been since she had arrived hours before.

“I feel . . . a little chilly,” she said, surprised. He nodded, like he had expected it.

“The heat will be going down,” he explained, settling onto the bed beside her and holding out a small glass of water. “You’ll feel less fevered now that we’ve coupled, and even less so the time after that.” He watched her take the glass and drink, greedy, gulping the water down until the glass was dry and she gave it back to him, gasping a little for air. “By the third time you’ll hardly feel your heat at all.”

The implication of what he had said landed rudely, and she flinched back in alarm. He gave her an answering look of concern, and gentled her with a hand on her leg.

“You didn’t know it would be this way,” he said. Not a question, but she answered it like one anyway.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He stroked her leg through the sheet, which he must have put over her while she slept. “We can stop, but we’re no further ahead if we do.”

“What do you mean?” she frowned. “I already feel better.”

“Yes, because you just came off my cock,” he chuckled. “You’re still full of everything I unloaded in you. That’s why the fever went down. Think of it as a dosage, if it helps. You take one shot, you start feeling better. But you need to take the whole course to stay that way. Doctor ever told you that about antibiotics? They start working sooner than the dosage stops. If you don’t finish the cycle of treatment . . . well.”

He sighed.

“Your mother will still come home to find you cycling, and then it will be whatever it is. If you want to stop, we can. But if we do stop now, the first fuck was all for nothing.”

He studied her appraisingly. She wondered how much of her feeling about this he could read on her face. She wondered if he could tell her what she was feeling better than she could, because right now, she honestly wasn’t sure.

“Will we . . . will we have to do it again?”

“After the next time? Once more at least, to be sure. Three’s usually the minimum for an ordinary cycle. Maybe more for some, but someone like you, barely begun, three should be the regular treatment to bring you off it naturally.”

She tried to sit up, but the ache between her legs bade her move so slowly she gave up, and flopped back on the pillow instead.

“I don’t want to do it again,” she said, but it was not an answer, and Adam seemed to know that. He squeezed her ankle understandingly.

“I know you don’t.”

“It hurt,” she added, as if further explanation of her reluctance were warranted, since this man had been so kind as to fuck her down the first time when she had asked him to, and now here she was, rejecting his help like some ungrateful brat instead of thanking him for knotting her and promising she would do her part to help him knot her again.

“I know.” His hand was still steady on her leg, a warm, authoritative weight. She sighed.

“I have to do it again,” she said. “Don’t I.”

He nodded.

“It would be best.”

“Will . . .” she tried to think of a way to phrase her question that would not impugn his ability to fuck her properly. “Will it still hurt? As much?”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but I can’t say for sure. Because you’re so small, there will probably always be some discomfort when I’m inside you. But it won’t be like the first time because you’ll have had my knot in you already, and you will probably take me better with each subsequent coupling. Either way,” he shrugged, “only one way to know for sure.”

She nodded, considering.

“Well . . . does it have to be right away? Now?”

“No, of course not.” He indicated the end of the bed, where she saw he had rearranged her clothes after collecting them from where they had dropped on the floor. “You can get dressed. We’ll grab a bite to eat, and wait for the fever to set back on you. It will be easier for you to take me once it has. You won’t mind as much, what we do, if you’re hot for it.”

She felt a little better at the prospect of that. Food sounded good, too.

“Okay,” she said, gingerly easing her legs over the side of the bed, trying as she did to ignore the pull and burn of her thigh muscles and the deep, dull cramp in her belly where he had opened her up, “let’s do that.” Then she paused, overcome with embarrassment at her perfect state of nudity, and whispered, “Um . . . could you . . . . would you mind stepping out to let me get dressed?”

And she loved the way he did not laugh at her for remembering her modesty only after she had let him finger her cunt and taken his cock, but simply said all right.

* * *

Adam did not know what teenagers liked to eat, so to be on the safe side he put together sandwiches, hauled various vegetables out of the fridge and was just in the process of cracking an egg when Megan stepped out of the bedroom, once more wearing her jeans and sweater, and made a hungry beeline for the food before coming to a stumbling halt and looking to him for further direction.

“Go on,” he laughed. “Eat.” Then, reaching for the package of bacon he had also rescued from the darkened interior of the silent fridge, “you’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

“Me? No,” she mumbled around a mouthful of baby carrots and tuna salad. “Ohmygod is this the best food ever?”

“No,” he said, scrambling the eggs with more vigor than finesse, “that’s just eating after sex. At least,” he carried the cast iron skillet over to the woodstove, where the fire he’d made while she was asleep had kindled to a modest inferno, heating his makeshift cooktop nicely, “after our kind has sex.”

Then he set the pan on the stove, checked to make sure there was room for the smaller pan of bacon, and went back to get it.

Megan generously left him a half sandwich and the celery sticks, for which apparently even her post-fuck ravenousness could not give her an appetite. Then, as the smell of the frying bacon filled the cottage, she drifted over to the woodstove as if drawn by a magnet. He watched her carefully, half suspecting she might try to pick it right out of the pan, but she kept her fingers to herself until he had retrieved both skillets and turned the food out onto the plates they had picked clean of sandwiches and vegetables just minutes before.

“Ummm,” Megan sighed, and in very short order had cleared her plate of its second course as well.

Adam ate only a little more slowly, giving her just a minute or two at the end of his meal to wander over to the window at the front of the cottage and attempt to peer out into the dark.

“What time is it?” she wondered, then sought out the illegible face of the battery-powered kitchen clock, set too deeply in the shadows and gloom of the rafters to read.

Adam checked the face of his own watch. “A little after six,” he reported. “So, supper time.”

“I missed lunch,” said Megan, and sounded faintly surprised. “Huh.”

“Well, if the power stays off we may be having two lunches tomorrow,” Adam predicted, thinking of his perishables. Then, belatedly, he considered the logistics of their unique manner of “tomorrow.” Megan’s thoughts seemed to be running along the same lines, because she pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweater and moved closer to the woodstove, a frown on her face, before she spoke.

“Am . . . do I . . . will I have to sleep here tonight?”

Adam shrugged.

“You don’t have to, if you would rather not. I don’t den.” He gave her a wry half smile, but she only stared blankly in response, so he was forced to fumble for an explanation.

“Uh. It was a thing, for a while. Before your time, I guess? Denning, when pairs would hole up for the week, not take any visitors, and sometimes there’d be fights if somebody came to the door. Hippie culture,” he added, even more apologetic in the face of her present-day confusion. “Getting back to the old ways, all earthy and . . . shit. Forget it.” He dragged an exasperated hand through his hair. “Christ, kid, you make me feel old.”

“You _are_ old,” Megan said frankly, then stopped to consider. “I mean . . . how old _are_ you?”

He shook his head with a grimace.

“Nuh uh. Don’t need any more cracks out of you. Guess my age if you like, but I’ll leave it at that.”

He ferried the dishes over to the sink, and Megan, seeing him start to run the water, stirred into purposeful restlessness.

“I’ll do it,” she said, and her voice was a little softer as she spoke. He didn’t comment; let her realize she was slipping back into her fever if she wanted to, or wait for her to figure it out on her own if not. He backed away from the sink and leaned on the table, arms, folded, to watch her work.

She was barefoot, which he found mostly adorable, but slightly arousing as well. The scent rolling off of her had turned into something less foreign and more familiar, which meant she’d taken his claim very well, and was already mirroring some of his own pheromones in response to it. One more fuck and he would probably not even mind the thought of letting her walk back up to her house, if she insisted. No other alpha would dare make a claim by then, even if there were any around, and she would have the ability to refuse all but him.

He wondered, idly, if her responsiveness was due in part to her age, or inexperience, or both. There weren’t many kids her age in this part of the world who were allowed to settle down, certainly not before college, so maybe this was some part of their culture they had lost as they advanced into modernity and civility and the proper, scientific regulation of it all. Maybe omegas took to you more slowly after it had been medicated out of them, or maybe it was just that she was so inexperienced she had no resolve built up against him, and others of his kind.

Experimentally, he moved closer. Megan continued to focus on the dishes, scrubbing the last two plates with particular care.

Adam put his nose to her hair and inhaled.

Her hands trembled, and it was only the quickness of his reflex that saved the plate.

“Careful,” he said, but it was mild, not real reproof. Nothing that would demand she kneel and grovel, or anything like that. Megan merely bowed her head and her hands rested limp and unresisting on the edge of the sink.

Her scent thickened in the air, and he imagined the slick of her heat returning to match.

“There we go,” he said, and held the last plate under the running water before placing it, dripping wet, in the dish rack. “Let’s give you another knotting now, Megan. And then we can decide about tonight.”

She stood still, passive and accepting, much faster to sink into her role than she had been the first time. It was good, he thought approvingly, that she was so teachable. Somehow he’d imagined a kid would be the opposite, feisty and fighting him all the way. Unable to accept her role and the demands of it. But Megan took to it so naturally, he honestly found it quite charming.

“Here,” he said, reaching around her slight frame to find the button of her jeans, and pop it free. “Let’s get you bare for me.” He let her keep the sweater, though it did hang down just below her buttocks and so technically covered her cunt, which was a breach of the usual protocol he demanded of his mates. But bare from the waist, he decided, was still bare from the waist, and an inexperienced girl was allowed the grace of a technicality or two. Especially when she was as obliging as this girl was.

Adam turned Megan around to face the kitchen table, away from the sink, and gave her a moment to place her hands on the gray barnboard surface. Then he fit his hands around her hips and made her walk her feet back out from the table until her buttocks were presented properly, her balance depending entirely on the feet he nudged apart and the table she leaned too far forward to let go of.

He trailed an evaluative finger through her folds, testing the slick of her and deciding there was enough there to give it a go, but also reluctant to force her immediately back into acceptance if he could make it any easier.

“Still sore?” he wondered, and she shivered.

“A—yes. A little. But—”

“Not minding it as much?”

Megan shook her head, no.

“Right. It will be like that. You’ll still hurt, but you’ll want to take it anyway. That’s the heat. And I can help, too.” He slipped a forefinger and middle finger inside her, easy, casual, without warning. She stiffened for only a moment and then sighed adorably, relaxing into the penetration with a pathetic gratitude that had him immediately, fully hard.

“There’s my girl,” he soothed, stroking in and out. Giving her time to get used to it would be a mistake, he decided. She responded too well to domination for him to miss the cues, to think that gentling her when she required command would be of any help. Calming her only as needed seemed to be the way forward with Megan, who was already soaking his palm and rocking back happily to meet his fingers with every thrust.

“This one will be quicker,” he predicted. “Hang on.”

“Hang on to what?” she asked, alarm edging her tone again, but he figured she’d find something. Smart kid like her, she could work it out. He popped his hand free with a wet, satisfying sound and used his glistening fingers to unzip the front of his own jeans and free his cock.

One preparatory nudge was all the grace he gave her, and then on the first full thrust he was in. She didn’t scream or cry but her whole body locked up tight for the duration of his entering thrust, and only slacked at the joints when he drew back to stroke in the second time.

By the third stroke she’d caught hold of the table and on the fourth she rested her cheek against the surface.

She was ready.

He did not slack or alter his pace from that point forward. He fucked her like a woman fully grown, though he let her cry under him in a way he would not have tolerated from an older, more experienced partner. Somehow in Megan it did not spark quite the same alpha fury that it did when coming from an older woman, so he supposed in its own way it might have some evolutionary function that protected her, saving her from the worst of his wrath by reminding him she was still very new to her role and deserved the guidance of a teacher before she suffered the retributive domination of her master.

Remembering this, his role being that of her instructor as much as anything else, Adam did her the courtesy of gripping her hips and lifting her feet clear off the floor so she could recognize the superiority of that angle in allowing him full claim. His thrusts intensified, hammering into the core of her, and already he could feel the knot begin to swell.

Her little coos and cries were so sweet, he actually locked into her before the knot was even at full size. It swelled within her, sealing her with its girth more gently than it had for their first round, and he was only able to manage three or four abortive half-thrusts before he collapsed on her, forcing her down onto the table, and came with a low, guttural moan.

She had not even come yet herself, but did so now, charmingly responsive to his pleasure. She came just once more after that, which economy of pleasure he supposed might have owed itself to the speed of his own completion. Guilt twinged at him until he reached around and diddled her firmly to a third climax. Then he hauled up a kitchen chair and settled down into it, Megan sweaty and bleary-eyed once more as she nestled on his lap.

He let her curl up against him as best she could, the knot still limiting the degree to which she could do so, before he pressed a kiss to her shoulder, chased it with a nip, and felt her come again.

“Better?” he asked. She hesitated, then nodded. He was amused to see she looked honestly surprised.

“Still sore?” he pursued, and she grimaced, but again the nod.

“You take it like a champ, Megan,” he promised, and followed the nip with another, gentler kiss. “Sucks that it has to hurt, but I promise you’ll learn to like it. Nature has a way, you know?”

Then he let her melt against him, pliant and sweet, and doze on his shoulder while she waited once more for the knot to go down.

* * *

Megan went home for pajamas and clothes and some other necessities after she agreed to spend the night with Adam. He had teased her about the pajamas, asking if she really thought he would let her wear them, and even though the comment had immediately sparked her arousal she still insisted that she wanted to have her pajamas. So he had not pushed back against it, but he had followed her to her house when she went to retrieve them.

He followed her up to her bedroom as well.

He let her take her time over the choice of clothing, patient in a kind of calm, deliberate way that made her aware of his mastery of the entire situation, of her inability to refuse him and his right to insist that she should not. He had even let her put the clothes in a little bag, preparatory to taking them to the cottage with her, before finally pushing her down onto the bed and fucking her into her own mattress until she screamed, the knot filled her again, and she climaxed on it like she would never stop.

She did not fall asleep that time, but got shakily to her feet at his command when the knot released her, and gathered her clothing bag at his order. He made her walk back to the cottage in front of him, bared from the waist down even in the sleet of the storm, so his semen trailed down her thigh and the sleet lashed the final remnants of the fever from her bones. By the time they reached his cottage she was shaking, frozen, and almost witless with her need to be fucked again. It was as if his assertion of his claim in that way had taken her into a new phase of her heat, where the very recognition of his right to her body was now what kindled the fire in her belly and made her long to be mounted by him.

He pulled off her boots, kissed her icy knees, stripped the sweater from her frame and swept her up in his arms. Then he carried her into his bedroom, bent her over his bed, and showed her exactly what she was made for. Even over the sound of the storm outside, she was positive that anybody who might have wandered close for a mile in any direction would have been able to hear her screams.

He did not let her sleep until she’d been knotted twice more, and finally, overwhelmed by the fatigue of the day, the wee hours of the morning he’d fucked her into and the dizzying contradiction of her cunt’s tender, swollen, aching raw need, she spread her legs to him in mindless acceptance of whatever else he might wish to do. Then, at the first brush of his fingertips across the lush red flesh of her fully, freshly fucked cunt, she came yet again and promptly fell asleep.

* * *

Adam waited until he was certain Megan was fully under, then mounted her one more time and rode her briefly to his final effort of the evening—the morning—the new day. He finished her with a smallish knot, relishing the way she slept on through it all, heedless of his presence within her, her exhaustion claiming her as thoroughly as he had done.

He, too, slept after that, arm wrapped around her, knot still inside, and did not even wake when it subsided and he finally fell free.

* * *

When Megan woke Adam was already back inside her, but it felt different now. The slick of her arousal was missing, the fever was gone, and she felt every inch of him in a way she simply couldn’t bear. She panicked, beating at him frantically, then opened her eyes to see his face and instantly fell still.

“Owww,” she whimpered. “Oww, Adam, it _hurts_.”

“Good,” he said. “Remember that.” He gave a punishing thrust deeper inside, wringing a yowl from her throat.

“Your heat’s gone down,” he added, resuming the previous staccato of his rhythm, “and I can’t knot you anymore. But I had a feeling you might want to remember what it really felt like, without all the hormones fucking you up, before you go asking somebody else to fuck you through it next time. You understand?”

She did. She nodded tearfully to show him as much, but she still didn’t like it. He seemed to know that, too, because he nodded grimly at the sight of her tears and gave another evaluative thrust that made her shriek.

“Girls who go looking for trouble are bound to find it,” he scolded, his breath coming a little choppier now as he approached his orgasm. “Girls . . . who ask men . . . to fuck them . . .” he was so close now, even out of her heat she knew the signs, had learned them like your muscles learned the balance you had to strike on a bicycle, like your skin learned a brand, “had damn well . . . be ready . . . to get . . . _fucked_.”

And on _fucked_ he fucked into her, fucked his semen into her, bore her down with his weight into the mattress so she could not breathe, could not move, could only spread her legs in silence and take, and she knew that his final lesson would be the lesson that stuck.

Once she got her breath back, she thought distantly, she would make him some breakfast. Get everything perishable out of the fridge and cook it for him in thanks for giving her, if not what she had known she wanted, exactly what he knew she’d need. But for now he was still softening inside her, large and knot-free, and she found even her raw-fucked cunt still had one tiny flutter of gratitude left to give.

While she waited for Adam to tire and roll off her, Megan’s gaze drifted to the bedroom window and the striking clarity that awaited her there, a marked contrast to the tempest of the previous night.

The storm was over, the sun was out, and if Megan was any judge of such things at all, it was going to be a beautiful day.


End file.
